A Bend in the River (39 page)

“Nobody told me.”

“It wasn’t the kind of thing people would talk a lot about. And your thoughts were elsewhere.”

That was true. There had been a coolness between us at that time; we had both been scratchy after Noimon’s departure.

I said, “What about the Tivoli? All that new kitchen equipment. They invested so much.”

“That’s crippled with debt. No African in his right mind would want to be the trustee of that. They queued up for yours, though. That was when I knew you hadn’t done anything. Théotime and another man actually came to blows, right here in Bigburger. There were a lot of fights like that. It was like a carnival after the President announced the measures. So many people just going into places, not saying anything to the people inside, just making marks on doors or dropping pieces of cloth on the floor, as though they were claiming a piece of meat in the market. It was very bad for a few days. One Greek burnt down his coffee plantation. They’ve calmed down now. The President issued a statement, just to let everybody know that what the Big Man gives the Big Man can take away. That’s how the Big Man gets them. He gives and he takes back.”

I spent the rest of the morning at Bigburger. It was strange for me, wasting the working day in chat, giving news, asking for news, watching the coming and going in Bigburger and the van der Weyden across the road, and all the time feeling myself separated from the life of the town.

Mahesh had little to tell me about Shoba. There was no change there. She still hid with her disfigurement in the flat. But Mahesh no longer fought against that situation or seemed irritated by it. It didn’t make him unhappy—as I had feared it might—to hear about London and my travels. Other people travelled; other people got away; he didn’t. For Mahesh it had become as simple as that.

I became Théotime’s manager. He seemed relieved and happy, and agreed to the salary I suggested for myself. I bought a table
and chair and set them next to the pillar, so that it was almost like old times. I spent many days assembling old invoices, checking stock and preparing the inventory. It was a complicated document, and of course it was padded. But Théotime approved it so readily (sending me out of the storeroom while he struggled to sign
Cit:Theot:)
that I felt that Mahesh was right, that no compensation was going to be paid, that the most I could expect, if anybody remembered, were government bonds.

The inventory only reminded me of what I had lost. What remained? In a bank in Europe I had about eight thousand dollars, proceeds from my gold dealings in the old days; that money had just stayed and rotted, losing value. There was the flat in the town, for which there would be no buyer; but the car would fetch a few thousand dollars. And I had about half a million local francs in various banks—about fourteen thousand dollars at the official rate of exchange, and half that on the free market. That was all; it wasn’t a great deal. I had to make more, as fast as I could; and the little I had, I had to get out of the country.

As manager in the shop I had opportunities; but they were not extraordinary. And so I began to live dangerously. I began to deal in gold and ivory. I bought, stored and sold; or, acting for bigger operators (who paid directly to my bank in Europe), I stored and shipped on, for a percentage. My suppliers, and sometimes the poachers, were officials or army people, and these people were always dangerous to deal with. The rewards were not great. Gold only sounds expensive; you have to handle kilos before your percentage amounts to anything. Ivory was better, but ivory was more difficult to store (I continued to use the hole at the bottom of the staircase in my yard) and trickier to ship. For shipping I used one of the ordinary market vans or jitneys, sending the stuff (larger tusks in mattress consignments, smaller pieces in sacks of cassava) with other goods, always doing so now in the name of Citizen Théotime, and sometimes getting Théotime himself to pull a little political rank and give the driver a good talking to in public.

Money could be made. But to get it out of the country was another matter. Money can be got out of countries like these
only if you deal in very large sums and can get high officials or ministers to take an interest; or if there is a certain amount of business activity. There was little activity now, and I had to depend on visitors who for various reasons needed local currency. There was no other way. And I had to trust these people to pay up when they got back to Europe or the United States.

It was a slow, tout-like, humiliating business. I wish I could say that I discovered certain rules about human behaviour. I wish I could say that people of a certain class or country were to be trusted and people of another class and country not trusted. That would have made it much simpler. It was a gamble each time. I lost two-thirds of my money in this way; I gave it away to strangers.

I was in and out of the Domain on this money business; it was there that I made many of my contacts. At first it made me uneasy to be there. But then I proved Indar’s point about trampling on the past: the Domain quickly ceased to be what it had been for me. It became a place where honourable people—many of them first-time lawbreakers, who were later to use their respect for the law to cheat me with a clear mind—tried to get better rates than the ones we had agreed on. What was common to these people was their nervousness and contempt—contempt for me, contempt for the country. I was half on their side; I envied them the contempt that it was so easy for them to feel.

One afternoon I saw that Raymond and Yvette’s house had a new tenant, an African. The house had been closed since I had come back. Raymond and Yvette had gone away; no one, not even Mahesh, could tell me where or in what circumstances. The doors and windows of the house were wide open now, and that emphasized the shoddiness of the construction.

The new man, barebacked, was forking up the ground just in front of the house, and I stopped to have a chat. He was from somewhere downriver, and friendly. He told me he was going to grow maize and cassava. Africans didn’t understand large-scale agriculture; but they were passionate planters in this smaller way, growing food for the house and liking to grow it very close to the house. He noted my car; he remembered his bare back. He
told me he worked for the government corporation that ran the steamer service. And to give me some idea of his standing, he said that whenever he travelled on the steamer he travelled first class and free. That big government job, this big government house in the famous Domain—he was a happy man, pleased with what he had been granted, and asking for nothing else.

There were more households like his in the Domain now. The polytechnic was still there, but the Domain had lost its modern, “showplace” character. It was scruffier; every week it was becoming more of an African housing settlement. Maize, which in that climate and soil sprouted in three days, grew in many places; and the purple-green leaves of the cassava, which grew from a simple cutting even if you planted it upside down, created the effect of garden shrubs. This piece of earth—how many changes had come to it! Forest at a bend in the river, a meeting place, an Arab settlement, a European outpost, a European suburb, a ruin like the ruin of a dead civilization, the glittering Domain of new Africa, and now this.

While we were speaking, children began to appear from the back of the house—country children still, bending a knee at the sight of the adult, before coming up shyly to listen and watch. And then a large Doberman came bounding out at me.

The man with the fork said, “Don’t worry. He’ll miss you. He can’t see very well. A foreigner’s dog. He gave it to me when he went away.”

It was as he said. The Doberman missed me by about a foot, ran on a little way, stopped, raced back, and then was all over me, wagging his docked tail, beside himself with joy at my foreigner’s smell, momentarily mistaking me for somebody else.

I was glad for Raymond’s sake that he had gone away. He wouldn’t have been safe in the Domain or the town now. The curious reputation that had come to him in the end—of being the white man who went ahead of the President, and drew on himself the bad things that should have fallen on the President—that reputation might have encouraged the Liberation Army to kill him, especially now, when the President was said to be planning to visit the town, and the town was being made ready for that visit.

The rubbish hills in the centre were being carted away. The corrugated streets were being levelled and graded. And paint! It was everywhere in the centre, slapped onto concrete and plaster and timber, dripping on the pavements. Someone had unloaded his stock—pink and lime and red and mauve and blue. The bush was at war; the town was in a state of insurrection, with nightly incidents. But suddenly in the centre it seemed like carnival time.

Citizen Théotime would come in in the mornings, red-eyed and tormented-looking, high on his breakfast beer, with a couple of comic books or photo-novels to see him through office hours. There was an informal system of magazine exchange in the town; Théo always had something new to look at. And oddly, his comic books or photo-novels, tightly rolled up, gave him a busy, businesslike air when he came into the shop. He went straight to the storeroom, and could stay there without coming out for the whole morning. At first I thought it was because he wanted to be out of the way and not to be any trouble. But then I understood that it was no hardship for him. He liked being in the dark storeroom with nothing in particular to do, just looking at his magazines when the mood took him, and drinking his beer.

Later, when he became easier and less shy with me, his storeroom life became fuller. He began to be visited by women. He liked them to see him as a real
directeur,
with a staff and an office; and it pleased the women too. A visit could take up a whole afternoon, with Théotime and the woman chatting in the way people chat when they are sheltering from the rain—with long pauses and long hypnotized stares in different directions.

It was an easy enough life for Théotime, easier than anything he could have imagined when he was a mechanic in the health department. But as he gained confidence, and lost his fear that the shop might be taken away from him by the President, he became difficult.

It began to worry him that as a
directeur
he didn’t have a car.
Some woman had perhaps given him the idea, or it might have been the example of other state trustees, or it might have been something he had got from his comic books. I had a car; he began to ask for lifts, and then he required me to drive him to and from his house. I could have said no. But I told myself it was a small thing to do to keep him quiet. The first few times he sat in the front; then he sat in the back. This was a four-times-a-day duty.

He didn’t stay quiet for long. It might have been my easiness, my wish to appear unhumiliated: Théotime was soon looking for new ways of asserting himself. The trouble now was that he didn’t know what to do. He would have liked to live out his role in fact—to take over the running of the shop, or to feel (while enjoying his storeroom life) that he was running the shop. He knew, though, that he knew nothing; he knew that I knew he knew nothing; and he was like a man enraged by his own helplessness. He made constant scenes. He was drunken, aggrieved and threatening, and as deliberately irrational as an official who had decided to be
malin.

It was strange. He wanted me to acknowledge him as the boss. At the same time he wanted me to make allowances for him as an uneducated man and an African. He wanted both my respect and my tolerance, even my compassion. He wanted me, almost, to act out my subordinate role as a favour to him. Yet if, responding to his plea, I did so, if I took some simple shop document to him, the authority he put on then was very real. He added it to his idea of his role; and he would use that authority later to extort some new concession. As he had done with the car.

It was worse than dealing with a
malin
official. The official who pretended to be offended—and bawled you out, for instance, for resting your hand on his desk—was only asking for money. Théotime, moving quickly from a simple confidence in his role to an understanding of his helplessness, wanted you to pretend that he was another kind of man. It wasn’t funny. I had resolved to be calm about my dispossession, to keep my mind on the goal I had given myself. But it wasn’t easy to be calm. The shop became a hateful place to me.

It was worse for Metty. The little services that he had done for Théotime in the beginning became things that he was required to do, and they multiplied. Théotime began sending Metty out on quite pointless errands.

Late one evening, when he returned to the flat after being with his family, Metty came into my room and said, “I can’t take it,
patron.
I will do something terrible one of these days. If Théo doesn’t stop it, I’ll kill him. I’d rather hoe in the fields than be his servant.”

I said, “It won’t last long.”

Metty’s face twisted with exasperation, and he did a silent stamp with one foot. He was close to tears. He said, “What do you mean? What do you mean?” and went out of the room.